But Rufus breasted past her muttering within himself, “Never again!”
... Pidge and Rufe Melton went over to Bank Street for supper that evening. Rufus wasn’t hungry. He had bought a golf suit that looked very well on him, he said, but evidently now he was troubled how to use it. He hadn’t done any work so far to-day and felt less like it than ever. Pidge thoughtlessly mentioned that an Indian letter had come in to the office from Richard Cobden that day.
“You folks are dippy about this Cobden,” Rufe said. “Every time an article of his comes out in the Passé Square, you gather together to read it as if it had come from the Messiah. What’s he to you, Pan—a little bit tender on your Dicky?”
“A little bit tender,” she said.
Rufus felt abused. He glared at her. This sort of thing had happened before. Rufe had come to look at Pidge as his picket pin. He had a long rope and everything was all right, so long as the pin held. But her manner now would uncenter any man.
“I’d like to get out of Harrow Street,” he growled. “Every time I put my address on the top of a manuscript, I feel it’s a knock rather than a boost. I’ve been tempted to get an agent, for no other reason than to have his address for the magazines to work through. I was talking with Redge Walters who bought this story to-day, and he said, ‘Rufe, you sure fall for the little bobbed heads down in the Village, don’t you? Why don’t you come uptown and live in New York?’”
“I like Harrow Street,” said Pidge.
“You don’t make a secret of it, either,” he went on. “Of course, Miss Claes is kind and all that, but we pay for what we get, and there’s no question in my mind about the pictures in her gallery being hung crooked.”
“If you’ve finished your supper, let’s go,” said Pidge.